actors
Heather Neill
David Troughton (b.1950), a familiar face on television and a Royal Shakespeare Company veteran, is a versatile actor. His most recent RSC appearance before Gloucester displayed his talent for comedy: he was a funny and energetic Simon Eyre in Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday in his favourite theatre, the Swan at Stratford. Previous roles for the company have included Kent in an earlier Lear with John Wood as the king, Bolingbrooke in Richard II and the title roles in Richard III and Henry IV, parts 1 and 2.Earlier this year, in the West End and on tour, he played the eccentric, reclusive Tom Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
New York-born actor Robert Vaughn, who has died at the age of 83, achieved massive popular success when he starred as the sleek secret agent Napoleon Solo in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which ran for four seasons from 1964 to 1968 and exploited the then-new James Bond mania to ratings-busting effect. Prior to that, Vaughn, both of whose parents were actors, had racked up a long string of minor credits in American TV and movies, the most prestigious of which was an appearance in John Sturges's 1960 cowboy classic, The Magnificent Seven. The latter also starred Steve McQueen, with whom Vaughn Read more ...
Jasper Rees
What is it about Toby Jones? A decade ago he had a stroke of luck when a film producer spotted his physical similarity to Truman Capote and cast him as the lead in Infamous. The luck wasn’t unadulterated. Philip Seymour Hoffman played the same role in a different film and won an Oscar. While Infamous was overshadowed, Jones wasn't. The latest advance in his career finds him playing a medieval king in a film from the director of Gomorrah, the ultra-violent portrait of organised crime in Naples.Matteo Garrone's Tale of Tales adapts three of the many fairy stories anthologised by 16th-century Read more ...
theartsdesk
When sorrows come they come not in single spies. It is a bad week to be 69. Hard on the heels of David Bowie's death from cancer comes Alan Rickman's. He was an actor who radiated a sinful allure that first gave theatregoers the hot flushes back in 1985 when he played the Vicomte de Valmont in Christopher Hampton's Les Liaisons Dangereues. His co-star was Lindsay Duncan with whom he went on to share other highlights on stage: Private Lives in the West End and on Broadway, John Gabriel Borkman at the Abbey in Dublin.He had a late start as a star. His Hamlet came at the age of 47, followed by Read more ...
theartsdesk
The autumn cinema schedules of 2015 were assailed by the double whammy of Spectre and The Force Awakens– at times making it hard to find a screen showing anything else. Yet you’ll see that neither that latest instalment in the Bond franchise – though it’s been acclaimed as among the very best – nor the much-anticipated return of Star Wars appears on our list. Does that place us at the higher-brow end of the spectrum? Or sticking to a more determinedly eclectic ground, with Asif Kapadia's remarkable documentary Amy, Bill Condon’s unexpected addition to the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Maggie Smith rarely gives interviews. In the week that Downton Abbey's last-ever series episode is broadcast, and she reprises on screen her role in Alan Bennett's The Lady in the Van (pictured below with Alex Jennings), theartsdesk revisits an encounter that took place in Highclere Castle in 2010. It was the only interview Dame Maggie gave that summer apart from one – which took place just before – to Julian Fellowes. Back then global conquest was only a glint in his Lordship's eye and, talking in a chintzy side sitting-room just around the corner from the cameras and the milling Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The prospect of Ian McKellen and Anthony Hopkins acting together for the first time in their storied careers in Richard Eyre's BBC adaptation of The Dresser was one of those mouth-watering propositions to sit alongside DeNiro and Pacino on screen in Heat and the stage reunion of Dames Maggie Smith and Judi Dench in The Breath of Life.And if the rather lopsided result of this latest version of a Ronald Harwood play, already made into an Oscar-nominated film in 1983, saw to it that McKellen came up trumps, that may be in the nature of the piece itself: McKellen's Norman (pictured Read more ...
Heather Neill
Jane Lapotaire's distinguished career on stage and screen was cut short in 2000 when she collapsed in Paris with a massive brain haemorrhage. She was giving a Shakespeare masterclass at the time and now, 15 years later, at the age of 70, she is once again acting on stage in Shakespeare.She made the return to theatre in 2013 with an emotionally charged account of a small role, the mourning Duchess of Gloucester in the RSC's Richard II, starring David Tennant. As Greg Doran adds Henry V to his cycle of Histories – Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, were unveiled last year – she is relishing the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The country is groaning under the weight of commemorations, exhibitions, publications and programmes all marking significant anniversaries of World War One, but the underlying message – lest we forget – remains as potent as ever, perhaps even more so in these tumultuous times.Narrating this documentary chiefly concerned with the art of the First World War, Oscar-winning actor Eddie Redmayne told us that the art described the indescribable, conveying what is beyond description. If that sounds unbearably fey it isn’t at all, for the surprise and interest of this programme was in fact two-fold: Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The world now knows him as Lord Crawley, stiff-backed in white tie and tails, regimental garb or, for relaxation, tweed. But before he became the face of Downton Abbey – and of bumbling institutional incompetence in Twenty Twelve and W1A – Hugh Bonneville could be seen in roles of considerable depth and range, including a moving Philip Larkin and a brutish husband in the BBC's Daniel Deronda.The evidence was The Cazalets (pictured below), a stately six-part tour of well-to-do town and country folk as Blighty prepares to stand alone against Hitler. It was broadcast all the way back Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There came a moment, around three years ago, when MyAnna Buring suddenly seemed to be in everything. "I'm so sorry!" she shrieks (ironically) when I point this out to her. She had given warning of her arrival by appearing in Ben Wheatley's Kill List and, rather more prominently, as Tanya (who as you'll know was a vegetarian vampire from the Denali coven) in the concluding pair of Twilight films. Then Buring popped up in BBC One's Blackout, was Edna the Maid in Downton Abbey (where she brazenly set her cap at Tom Branson), flitted across our screens in ITV's The Poison Tree, and materialised Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Going into this programme, it dawned on me that I knew next to nothing about Mark Rylance's background – where he came from, who his parents were, what he does in his personal life. Having reached the end credits I was little the wiser, other than having learned that he has a wife called Claire, since none of it fell within the purview of Melvyn Bragg's interviewing.But I suppose there's always Wikipedia for the other stuff, and Bragg's close focus on Rylance the actor and his main spheres of thespian activity paid its own dividends. It prised out revelations about his approach to his craft, Read more ...